Obesity remains a serious health problem and it is no secret that many people want to lose weight. Behavioral economists typically argue that “nudges” help individuals with various decisionmaking flaws to live longer, healthier, and better lives. In an article in the new issue of Regulation, Michael L. Marlow discusses how nudging by government differs from nudging by markets, and explains why market nudging is the more promising avenue for helping citizens to lose weight.

Two long wars, chronic deficits, the financial crisis, the costly drug war, the growth of executive power under Presidents Bush and Obama, and the revelations about NSA abuses, have given rise to a growing libertarian movement in our country – with a greater focus on individual liberty and less government power. David Boaz’s newly released The Libertarian Mind is a comprehensive guide to the history, philosophy, and growth of the libertarian movement, with incisive analyses of today’s most pressing issues and policies.

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Archives: 10/2006

Today’s Washington Post suggests that the reaction of some “antiwar liberals” to a recent leak from the National Intelligence Estimate may have been unjustified. The NIE allegedly asserts that the war in Iraq is creating more terrorists than it is eliminating, and many Iraq war critics responded that they had always assured us it would — and that the war therefore is (and always was) a bad idea.

The Post dismisses this “I told you so” reaction as the product of “hindsight bias,” arguing that the critics hadn’t (and indeed couldn’t have) been certain of this outcome from the beginning — that they have only convinced themselves, retroactively, that they were.

Whether or not the Post’s observation is valid, it ignores a much more fundamental error in the critics’ reasoning: It is never the waging of wars that makes you safer, only the winning of them.

The U.S. was not safer in 1942–1945 than it had been in early 1941. We entered World War II because winning it would make America safer. In trying to win it, we suffered over a million casualties.

Part of the argument for toppling Saddam Hussein’s regime was that a beachhead for freedom and democracy in a Muslim Middle Eastern nation would, in the long term, weaken militant Islamism and promote peace. It was never suggested that the process of trying to create that beachhead would itself make anyone safer — no more than it was suggested that Americans would be safer during our participation in WW II.

Hence, it is fatuous to argue that a current rise in terrorist recruitment proves that toppling Saddam was a bad idea. Efforts to create a free and democratic Iraq are ongoing — the war is still in progress.

Note that none of this is to say that freedom and democracy are sure (or even likely) to take root in Iraq. Critics are welcome to argue that we and freedom-loving Iraqis will ultimately lose there, and be worse off if we do. But can we please treat logic and common sense as non-combatants, and stop assaulting them with fallacious arguments such as the one described above?

People are highly tuned risk managers. Daily, we make decision about risky things like crossing streets. To do so, we analyze the speed and density of traffic, light conditions, our own physical skills, and myriad other factors to determine whether to cross in the middle of a block or at a controlled intersection.

Five years since 9/11, people are getting better at assessing the risks of terrorist acts. And people are growing increasingly skeptical of the risk choices being made for them by the Department of Homeland Security. The evidence? Their willingness to see security lampooned.

The writers at The Onion are undoubtedly finding a good reception for this send-up of the Transportation Security Administration’s liquids rules.

And people are diverting themselves from their exasperation with airport security using this fun game.

A basic indictment of government-provided security is in daily newspapers’ comic sections this morning. Syndicated cartoon Bizarro by Dan Piraro is titled “Orientation Seminar at Homeland Security.” It depicts a teacher at a chalkboard that says “Inconvenience = Security.” (Available online here early next month).

The funny bone is a highly tuned instrument, and it’s showing the dissonance in air security today.

Legal scholars are debating whether the Military Commission Act [MCA], passed by Congress on September 29 and soon to be signed by President Bush, applies to U.S. citizens. The answer is more complicated than one would think.

First: Under Sec. 948a(1) an unlawful enemy combatant is “(i) a person who has engaged in hostilities or who has purposefully and materially supported hostilities against the United States or its co-belligerents …; or (ii) a person who…has been determined to be an unlawful enemy combatant by a Combatant Status Review Tribunal….” Use of the word “person” suggests that citizens may be detained as unlawful combatants.

But second: Sec. 7(a) denies habeas rights only to aliens. Thus, a citizen who is detained as an unlawful combatant would appear to have habeas rights to challenge his detention.

Moreover, third: Sec. 948b states that “[t]his chapter establishes procedures governing the use of military commissions to try alien unlawful enemy combatants.” In other words, only non-citizens may be tried by a military commission.

My conclusion: A citizen may be detained (subject to habeas challenge), but not tried, under the MCA.

When Chris Preble and I released “Failed States and Flawed Logic,” the Dean of the Wilson School at Princeton, Anne-Marie Slaughter, offered what I thought was a pretty cutting critique. While admitting that “Rhetorically, the distinctions between these positions…are relatively easy to elide,” Slaughter criticized Chris and me thus:

Preble and Logan lump together such unlikely bedfellows as Robert Kaplan, Niall Ferguson, Frank Fukuyama, Steve Krasner, Gerald Helman and Steve Ratner, David Laitin and James Fearon, Sebastian Mallaby, Max Boot, Tony Lake and the entire Clinton foreign policy team as neo-colonialists — all perceiving the principal threat to the U.S. as failed states and the optimal solution as a new era of colonialism, with far more altruistic motives and international supervision. Preble and Logan in turn worry that all of this is a justification for a massive nation-building enterprise that will ignore sovereignty and usher an extraordinarily costly and difficult era in which the U.S. will take on the task of turning all “bad” or weak states into mature democracies to ensure our safety, using military and non-military means.

I thought this was a pretty good point. After all, there’s got to be some daylight between, say, Max Boot, an open advocate of American Empire, and, say, Anthony Lake, no?

Well, crack open the op-ed page of the Washington Post this morning, and you get this from Brookings’ Susan Rice, Anthony Lake, and Donald M. Payne, on what to do in Sudan. Get ready:

It’s time to get tough with Sudan again.

After swift diplomatic consultations, the United States should press for a U.N. resolution that issues Sudan an ultimatum: accept unconditional deployment of the U.N. force within one week or face military consequences. The resolution would authorize enforcement by U.N. member states, collectively or individually. International military pressure would continue until Sudan relented.

The United States, preferably with NATO involvement and African political support, would strike Sudanese airfields, aircraft and other military assets. It could blockade Port Sudan, through which Sudan’s oil exports flow. Then U.N. troops would deploy — by force, if necessary, with U.S. and NATO backing.

If the United States fails to gain U.N. support, we should act without it. (Emphasis mine.)

All of a sudden, I’m not so sure any more that Slaughter’s critique holds all too well.

The real difference between the neoconservatives in the Bush administration and the liberal interventionists on the other side of the aisle seems to be that for Bush’s interventions, there’s at least a plausible, not to say persuasive, case that American interests are at stake.

In the case of the Dems’ preferred guerre du jour, there’s simply no national interest justification; the case for war, in this case, is made in the hazy language of international law and in contravention of the principle of sovereignty itself. (Indeed, Sudan has reportedly provided helpful cooperation in the war on terror, something that does affect the U.S. directly.)

For liberals, as for neocons, states only get to be states when we say so, and apparently Susan Rice and Anthony Lake have taken it upon themselves to determine that Sudan’s statehood isn’t acceptable anymore.

The tendency to make all the world’s troubles our own, the ultimate disregard for the United Nations and beneath it the entire Westphalian order, the false hope in the utility of military power to solve protracted political problems…these fundamental principles are all shared by the Bush administration. Given that the WaPo op-ed’s authors are representative of the Dems’ heavy hitters on foreign policy, maybe it’s too early to get excited that Dems could bring a less militaristic foreign policy, should they grab the reins from the Republicans. The wars they’ll start will just be further detached from genuine U.S. interests.

[In the National Health Service,] something important is quietly dying. I don’t think it is too fanciful to call it the spirit of medical professionalism. And we, the medical profession, are watching it die….

[F]ar from being privatised, medicine in England has become ever more a creature of the state….

[A]lthough medicine has embraced the need for evidence-based medicine, policy making remains largely an evidence-free zone.

Politicians consolidating and centralizing power…government sucking the soul out of a profession…ho-hum. It was the last line that really caught my attention.

I’ve noticed the same tendency on this side of the pond. For example, policymakers such as Sen. Chuck Grassley, Rep. Nancy Johnson, and the Institute of Medicine want Medicare to cook up “pay-for-performance” financial incentives that reward providers who deliver what the evidence suggests is “quality” care. You know, pay them to follow the evidence. As Forrest Gump might say, that’s a fine idea. The only problem is, private insurers have been trying that idea for 10 years, and there’s scant evidence to show that it actually works.

Personally, I think “P4P” has the potential to do a lot of good. But in a recent paper on the topic, I had to note the irony:

The P4P movement proceeds from two premises: first, that clinicians tend to underuse evidence from randomized clinical trials and, second, that financial incentives can increase such use and improve the quality of care. Yet whatever enthusiasm exists for P4P is not derived from the type of evidence of effectiveness that P4P enthusiasts believe should guide clinical practice. Third-party financial incentives remain an unproven tool for improving health care quality at all, let alone in a cost-effective manner.

The October edition of Cato Unbound is now underway with a new essay making “The Case for the Libertarian Democrat” by Markos Moulitsas, proprietor of the web’s most popular political blog, Daily Kos. Bruce Reed, president of the Democratic Leadership Council, Harold Meyerson, editor of the American Prospect, and Nick Gillespie, editor-in-chief of Reason will reply.

Looking to next month’s midterm elections, this month’s topic is “Should Libertarians Vote Democrat?” Here’s the lowdown about this issue:

In over a half-decade of Republican political dominance, Americans have witnessed a huge expansion in the scope and cost of government, a questionably justified and so-far unsuccessful war in Iraq, serious erosions of civil liberty, and a troubling tendency toward an imperial executive. Is it time for the traditional alliance between libertarians and conservatives to finally end? If Republicans in power have failed so utterly to promote libertarian ideals, would libertarians better advance their cause by supporting Democrats at the polls? Of course, the fact that libertarians have been so badly abused by conservatives doesn’t necessarily imply they will find a more welcoming home among liberals. Is the Democratic tent big enough to include small-government free-marketeers? Perhaps libertarians have something to gain by supporting to Democrats, but does the Democratic party have anything to gain by courting libertarians?